Share This Page

So I got a cheap little tablet (Hipstreet W7) from Target while that was a thing, as it was on sale for $100 so why not. It came with Windows 8.1, and I recently upgraded it to Windows 10. While I don't mind Windows 10, I wanted to try a Live CD/USB of some different Linux variants. So I set up a Ubuntu USB stick with LiLi USB creator, plugged it into the USB OTG cable, and rebooted the tablet to the USB device.

Except that it booted back into Windows. I tried Android x86, thinking nothing of it. That failed to boot as well, kicking me back into Windows. I even went into the UEFI firmware settings and did a boot from there (It has the option to boot from any attached devices, making it a bootloader of its own). It wouldn't boot it and would kick me back to the UEFI firmware. I did some digging around, and found the cause of all of my problems. It was the fact that the tablet's UEFI firmware was 32-bit, while almost all UEFI images are 64-bit, and because of this, it did not have legacy BIOS support which was the gist of the problem, plus the fact that 32-bit UEFIs are so rare that nobody develops for them which doesn't help either. There was a link to a build of Debian Linux that had a 32-bit UEFI boot file (You can find it here), and when flashed to a USB and plugged into the tablet, it actually booted! Only problem was that it wasn't touchscreen compatible, I had to plug in a mouse to operate it, and it didn't have a live version, it wanted me to install right away which I didn't want to do yet.

Here's my question: Are there any OSes that I can try live on my tablet that support 32-bit EFIs? I haven't been able to find any that do, as most, if not all of them only support 64-bit EFI images. Ubuntu does have support for it if you build the image using Ubunbu, but I don't really have the setup for that right now.

>>> "I was told to try Arch, but I'm not sure if it supports it properly or not."

So you're trying to get 32bit UEFI support, right? You should be able to just download a 32bit image of a GNU/Linux distribution. Are you familiar with GNU/Linux distributions? If you're not, then Arch is something that is not going to be the easiest thing to grasp. You will also need some assistance with the installation. You will either need an install script or you will need to read up on some heavy documentation. Or you could use something like Manjaro that uses the Arch philosophy.